Call for Participation: ImageEval 2026 Shared Task at ArabicNLP 2026

[Samir Abdaljalil]

Dear Colleagues,

We invite researchers and practitioners to participate in ImageEval 2026: Cultural Grounding in Arabic Multimodal Generation and Understanding, a shared task organized as part of ArabicNLP 2026, co-located with EMNLP 2026.

ImageEval 2026 focuses on Arabic language varieties and culturally specific visual content from the MENA region. The task suite evaluates visual question answering, image-grounded hallucination detection, and cultural accuracy evaluation for text-to-image generation, with dedicated tracks for participants to build, evaluate, and compare multimodal systems.

Tracks:

• Task 1: Culturally Grounded Arabic Visual Question Answering and Hallucination Detection
• Task 2: Cultural Accuracy Evaluation for Text-to-Image Generation

Participants are invited to develop systems, submit predictions, and write system description papers for the ArabicNLP 2026 proceedings.

Important Dates:

• July 20, 2026: Registration deadline and release of blind test data
• July 30, 2026: Final results announcement
• August 15, 2026: Shared task system paper submission due
• August 25, 2026: Notification of acceptance
• September 5, 2026: Camera-ready version due
• October 24–29, 2026: ArabicNLP main conference

Website: https://imageeval2026.github.io/

Data and code: https://github.com/ImageEval2026/ImageEval2026-tasks

Registration: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSd1QKF4rXD_gbLJlDykLvB0DGMIogwhraeOtWRiQiotucK0zA/viewform?usp=sharing&ouid=105545821070213772288

We encourage participation from the NLP, multimodal AI, computer vision, online safety, LLM safety, and Arabic language technology communities.

Best regards,

The ImageEval2026 Organizing Committee